Una's death in 1950 diminished life and poetry, just as Jeffers foresaw
it would, but the rapturous anticipation of unconsciousness in nature produced some
powerful lyrics in his remaining years. "Vulture" is a final testament to
pantheistic death and resurrection. . . .

The desultory pace of the opening description of the wheeling vulture
quickenswith "But how beautiful he looked," and the poet's sudden and
horrifying desire to serve as carrion for the beautiful, powerful bird of prey reaches the
limit of consciousness and articulation in his "enskyment" in the blood and
sinew of the barbaric bird. Across the continent from Paumanok, Jeffers the Romantic
Inhumanist found himself in a place much like that of Whitman the Romantic individualist
at the end of "Song of Myself:

The search for reintegration into the instinctual world of animals in
"Vulture" completely subverts Emerson's intention to use nature as a means of
spiritual transcendence--Emerson would rise above nature, while Jeffers wishes to be
digested into it. "Vulture" opens with the speaker lying "death-still"
on a hillside, watching a vulture make progressively lower circles, approaching him as a
potential meal. As the vulture closes in, the man takes in the beauty of the bird and
sincerely regrets having to pass up the opportunity to offer his body to the vulture:

. . . But how beautiful
he'd looked, gliding down
On those great sails, how beautiful he looked, veering away in
the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that
beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

Clearly, any sense of immortality, for Jeffers, derives from the
participation of the human body in the natural order. As the birds in "Birds and
Fishes" felt no remorse for their actions, Jeffers would not hesitate to play the
role of the fish. Man's truest link with nature, then, is not his ability to decipher it
intellectually but his ability to participate in it physically.